Nessa sighed and waved her hands in the air. “Okay, go do whatever you’re going to do. What are you going to do, anyway?”
Ken sat down in front of Phil’s laptop computer and brought up Phil’s favorite browser, something called Chrome; Nessa looked away. Alt and Javier stood behind Ken. “We’re going to attempt to hunch our way to some testimonials, from Dubuque worshippers. Javier and Alt will verify if they’re truth or not.”
“According to Atlanta and Mr. Lorenzi, Dubuque’s people don’t blab. It’s one of Dubuque’s tricks,” Celebrity said.
“This is still worth a try, especially if Alt has a hunch this’ll work,” Nessa said. She grabbed another piece of chocolate and turned to Celebrity. “Want some?”
“Can’t. Diet,” Celebrity said. Then laughed. “Old habits. Give me some.”
“You can still eat?” Phil asked Celebrity.
“I can still do anything I used to be able to do,” she said, purring. “And more besides.”
Phil rolled his eyes. “Ignoring the cocktail party come-ons, have you ever given any thought to what this all means? I mean, if you’re not flesh at all, then how can you have human emotions? Emotions come from immensely complex neural networks, coupled with your genes, your experiences and your hormones. The biochemistry behind emotions is insanely convoluted. How in the hell does that work if your body isn’t real?”
“Well, not only do I have all the normal emotions, I have a few extras besides,” Celebrity said.
“It’s not…” Phil paused, blanched, and leaned back, a bit fearful. “You’re a simulation.” He turned to Nicole, who sat, quiet, watching the interplay. “Can you verify there’s a mind in Celebrity’s body? Not some fancy computer program-like thing?”
Celebrity crossed her arms and growled.
“Sure seems like a human mind in there to me, well, more than human, actually,” Nicole said. “Human mind and human soul. Trust me, I know souls when I sense them, dead or alive.” Nicole paused. “Did you know your Aunt Edie’s been haunting you? Something about a thank you note you forgot to write…”
Phil sat down on the couch and Nessa avoided thinking about what Nicole could abnormally sense.
“You see ghosts?” Celebrity said.
Nicole nodded. “Lots and lots. Trust me, you don’t want to know yours.” She turned to Phil. “You know, for a computer wizard or whatever you are, you don’t seem to have enough imagination or something.” Phil frowned. Nicole could do the crusty old granny with the best of them. “She’s not made of flesh, she has human emotions and then some, she’s got human thoughts and then some, and she can do miracles…you know, I’ll bet she’s a God, Phil. Not only that, but consider what this says about the talents of God Almighty if He could create something like her!” Nicole tapped her foot and frowned.
Phil blanched again and Nessa giggled. The day was being hard on Phil. He turned to her.
“All of you scare the crap out of me,” Phil said. “I mean, you Telepaths all play with minds. How certain are you that this isn’t some other Telepath playing with your minds and all of our minds to make us think these Gods are real?”
“Come on, Phil,” Nessa said. “For a Telepath to be able to do any such thing, they’d need to be able to send thoughts all the way around the world and create illusions and mental control at long range. Nobody can, and if they could, they’d already run the place already.”
Voices giggled in the back of Nessa’s mind. She sighed. “Worse, they’d need to be able to make these God illusions act independently, a trick far beyond the capabilities of any human. The only ones we know who can do such tricks are Gods, like Celebrity here, which leads you nowhere.” The voices in Nessa’s mind acknowledged her point.
“Glad I’m not just chopped liver here,” Celebrity said.
“That isn’t the only thing bothering me,” Phil said. “Those damned hunches Ken and Alt seem to live by are the worst. It doesn’t make any sense that all you’re doing is seeing the present, like you say.”
Nessa looked over to Ken, Alt and Javier to make doubly sure they were too occupied in their activities to hear Phil’s question. She grabbed Phil and Celebrity and brought all three of their heads close together. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m convinced there’s more to hunches than seeing the present. Most is seeing the present, but some kind of spooky shit is coming in from somewhere else as well.” She paused. “No more questions, though. Us Telepaths really don’t like to think about whatever’s behind our own tricks and the like. We’re just not curious enough or something. I think this is a hunch about whatever’s behind us Telepaths. Yah know, something dangerous, at least to our sanity, and likely to all of yours, as well.”
“Got a good one,” Ken said, almost an hour later. “Listen to this, from one ‘Denver Dave’: ‘At my shrine, when I pray, Dubuque’s eyes become my everything. Praying to God Almighty never felt so good.’ He goes on and on; I’ll read the whole letter to you if you like. He’s definitely a worshipper. Dubuque cured him of some disease or other, too.”
“Something is strange about this man,” Alt said. “I’m not sure what. He’s important, though.”
“Damned toot’n,” Javier said. “He’s like Phil and Mary, but he’s got something else, too. I don’t know how to explain.”
“If you blank the screen you can sync me in,” Nessa said, holding up a hand to quiet the chatty and still nervous Celebrity, more nervous now from Phil’s logic and analysis. Nessa wasn’t happy, either; Phil kept bringing up things she didn’t want to think about. “I’ve got a lot of experience with other minds.”
Ken blanked the screen.
Nessa fell into the group telepathy, flowed over to their target, and laughed.
No way around this logic: Dubuque was as much their enemy as Miami, if not more so.
Which meant, oh shit on a shingle!, they were already up against the big dog, uh, big God. The threat of violence continued to haunt the edges of her mind. She had a hunch Dubuque would strike at them quickly once they turned away from his mission. Bad bad bad.
Ken refused to answer.
“I guess this is settled,” Nessa said aloud. “Next stop, Portland.” She turned to Celebrity. “Okay, now.” Celebrity furrowed her eyebrows. Nessa decided to try being polite. “Pick us
up and fly us to Portland, please, Celebrity.”
Celebrity sighed. “Flying really isn’t in my arsenal. I’d have a hard time flying your group across the room. Unless you want to trust air travel, we’re grounded. I can get us a tour bus, though.”
Tour bus. Figures, Nessa thought. She looked at Ken, who shrugged. “Bad memories aside, I think we can live with a bus,” he said. Celebrity started making suggestions and grabbing cell phones, working on lining up the tour bus she had promised them. From the tone of Celebrity’s voice, Nessa suspected she would be on a bus in a few hours.
The parallels to the past bothered Nessa a lot. Thoughts of unavoidable violence dancing in her head, she excused herself for a short sock conversation someplace private.
“Thus elevated in his own opinion, Apollonius, still preaching virtue by the way side, set out for Babylon, after visiting the cities of Antioch, Ephesus, etc., always attracting immense crowds. As he penetrated further toward the remote East, his troops of followers fell off, until he was left with only three companions, who went with him to the end. One of these was a certain Damis, who wrote a description of the journey, and, by the way, tells us that his master spoke all languages, even those of the animals. We have men in our own country who can talk “horse-talk” at the races, but probably none so perfectly as this great Tyanean.” – P.T. Barnum, Humbugs of the World
“Adrenaline, breakfast of champions.”
38. (Atlanta)
Atlanta didn’t know her location, but stopped anyway. A ginger swirl lay below her, slowly coiling in on itself. Embedded within the agglomerating swirl lay albescent flow lines, citron sparks and slate gray blobs. A thin cloud of saffron translucence flowed achingly slow by her, highlighted by aquamarine dots that enlarged from nothing to the size of her thumbnail before vanishing with a noiseless pop.
Tingles of relaxation surfed in waves across Atlanta’s body and mind, an awe she hadn’t expected at the unnatural world of the projection. Dimly experienced subsonic rumbles passed without notice or origin. Smells of cinnamon and cardamom mixed with a faint taste of pine on her tongue. The inverted scene within the world of projection: light below, dark above, mimicked that of airborne urban nighttime, save for the excessive brilliance. The flat black featureless ceiling over this unnatural world – for unnatural it felt, as it had none of the clean lines of the mixing of oceans, the layering of rock, or the fractal explosion of living nature – was but the backdrop, not a thing in and of itself. Nothing more than a lack; no stars, planets, sun or moon to guide the way.
When she learned the projection technique, self-taught from descriptions and observations of the other Gods, she hadn’t expected beauty. Nor did she know if any of the other Gods experienced the world of projection as she did, as none of the others who knew it would now speak of it to her. At best they were polite. At worst? Well, she did not want to think about the worst.
The ache, the emptiness within her grew day-by-day. She sensed the void within as a call, now unmistakable, to return to the fold of the other Gods. Even this unnatural video-game-like place settled her better than reality. Terrifying.
A jaundice-tinted flow of pinwheels erupted from below and to the left and forward, expanding as a dome set against the glowing roan floor of the world. A touch of wind confused Atlanta, face on and yet a tug forward on her lower legs. Titian streamers of perfectly formed hexagons sprayed into view from her left, angled down, and vanished unnaturally into the ginger swirl below her. A snippet of noise crackled in her right ear, which for a moment she decoded into an advertisement for some form of golf club that cured hooks and slices, then returned to the noise from which it arose, before it vanished altogether in a palpable absence of sound.
This, her current location, situated her at one of the special places within the world of projection. She understood now the intensity of Boise’s offhand and cryptic comment about projection, that it by itself proved the worth of all the trauma of being a God. The existence of beauty in the world of the Gods thrust upon her involuntarily served to calm her. The overwhelming despair she had fought over the past weeks eased. Yet, she knew that if she stayed here simply to admire and enjoy, she weakened her own Mission, a Mission that grew more tattered by the day. The palpable irony of the situation depressed her; she, the God most in tune with Integrity, Rapture and Congregation, now found herself so bereft of them. Her realization served to drain her will and her desire to act. Nor did Dana’s happy commentary about the self-limiting nature of the Gods and their actions buoy Atlanta, as Atlanta had self-limited the most.
From the back and the left, a wave of asymmetrical straw and fuchsia toroids dimpled with ebon arcs carved randomly into their surface danced toward her, at eye level. These held little beauty, so Atlanta turned and pushed forward, willing her projection to move, which it did at a rate she knew she could use to circle the globe in an hour. It amused her to wonder at, and boggle Dana with, the thinness of the world of projection, less than a mile tall, and incongruent to the true Earth. She had exited the world of projection once at its black roof and found herself below cumulus clouds; she had entered the world of projection on a sub-orbital God-hop a hundred and twenty miles above the Earth, and found herself in the heightwise middle of the world of projection. Exiting from the gummy floor of the world of projection inevitably landed one in a building, often a wildly incongruent translocation. If one wanted to match the true contours of the Earth, for purposes of navigation, one stayed where Atlanta now hovered, about four-fifths of the way up from the bottom of the place to its top.
Atlanta extended herself and dropped out of the world of projection. The late afternoon sky of Santiago stretched above her, and below her, a hundred feet below, squatted a forty-year-old unaesthetic wreck of an apartment building, all Socialist Modern and ugly. She flew her projection down toward the ground and off to the north, a difficult piece of work, as moving a projection at faster than a brisk run required the world of projection. Miami, the only Territorial God who would speak to her at the present, dealt with his personal business of the day from the Cuban town’s administrative center.
The dinginess of the town, of any town, drowned her happiness and returned her to the world of humanity. People milled about, doing their jobs, chatting, moving along the street in their own self-made streams. They ignored Atlanta, her projection invisible, which allowed Atlanta to flog reality to push her projection slowly across a square, through a building wall and into a long narrow room with a tall ceiling, lined with antiquated filing cabinets. The clacking of manual typewriters filled her ears, from elsewhere in this benighted backwards place.
There she waited until Miami finished terrorizing a so-called hero of the revolution, who in Atlanta’s opinion should have been in a nursing home somewhere. The world ached. She feared she would never have the time to experience the pleasure of a simple slow crossing of a beautiful area of the world of projection. She contemplated Dana’s recent chippiness and her own unhappiness at how badly the conflict with Dubuque had progressed. She worried about the fact that even Lorenzi’s damned throw-away ideas seemed more intelligent than her best-laid plans.
Even her most loyal subordinates now questioned the wisdom of Atlanta’s own long-term plans.
The center of her apprehension revolved around what she had learned from Celebrity. The difference between Celebrity’s abilities and her own boggled her mind and undercut her most basic assumptions. The more she analyzed those differences, the less she liked the results: the Host had created the Gods maimed, as artificially limited and blinkered as a car in an auto race, and maimed they remained. The Territorial Gods might be Indy cars and the Practical Gods stock cars, all with the illusion of improvement built into them, but the respective rules and limitations hemming them in were so severe as to make their divinity patently artificial. All they could do was circle the track and turn left.
Atlanta couldn’t now think of her own putative divinity as anything but artificial. She cou
ldn’t even think of herself as a demigod; at best she served as some damned tarted-up grade VI civil servant in some divine bureaucracy, a pathetic mockery of an Angel with the semblance of a physical body.
She pushed through the wall as Miami walked out of the corner office, surrounded by his entourage of tricked-up mortals. “So, when are you going to stage the revolution?” Atlanta said. Cuba, if anyplace, needed a revolution, a good purge. Rivers of blood.
Miami turned to her and shooed away flunkies, who marched off in Ranger file. “Damn if I know. I’m still having a hard time seeing how I’m going to do it without causing utter anarchy. There are times I feel like I’m swimming upstream.”
“I thought you didn’t mind anarchy.”
“I’m tolerant of it in moderate amounts,” Miami said, tugging on his tie and straightening his suit coat. “Societal collapse would harm my Mission. Only, how do I do anything about this sucking shithole without causing a total social collapse? What’s worse, the status quo harms my fucking Mission just as much.”
Atlanta nodded.
“So, Atlanta, do we have an agreement?”
“Yes,” she said. Time for business. “Lorenzi and his crew are willing to explain what has them agitated, in return for the right of passage through South Florida and the Keys.”
“Puta! I still don’t like it that they won’t tell me why they want right of passage,” Miami said. Miami groused. He complained continuously, as far as Atlanta could figure. “But with the damned Telepaths out of the way, my former objections are gone. I’ll take the information.”
“I figured you would,” Atlanta said. She figured that the reason Lorenzi hadn’t been willing to tell anyone his plans was sheer embarrassment that he had anything to do with something so damned unlikely to succeed. “They’re related, by the way.”
“The reason why Lorenzi’s coming to Florida or the information?” Miami strutted. Even as relaxed as Atlanta had ever seen him, Miami strutted. She realized he had grown to where he could even draw power from his bullying.
99 Gods: War Page 44